God’s hiddenness and the silence of heaven
You’ve prayed and heard nothing. You’ve looked for God and found silence. You’ve watched someone walk away from faith not because of intellectual objection but because God simply felt absent — for months, for years, long enough that the absence itself became the answer. Divine hiddenness is not a theoretical problem for philosophy classrooms. It’s the lived experience of real people, including people in your church, including perhaps you. And it deserves something better than a pat answer and a Bible verse about faith.
The philosopher J.L. Schellenberg turned divine hiddenness into a formal argument against God’s existence. His reasoning goes like this: if a perfectly loving God existed, He would ensure that no one who was genuinely open to a relationship with Him remained without the experiential awareness of His presence. But some people who are genuinely open, genuinely seeking, genuinely not resisting — remain in sustained darkness. Therefore, either God is not perfectly loving, or God does not exist.
That’s the philosophical version. But most people encounter divine hiddenness long before they encounter Schellenberg. They encounter it in a hospital waiting room. In the months after a miscarriage. In the foxhole where the prayer went unanswered and the friend didn’t come home. In the long stretch of depression when God felt as present as silence itself.
This problem isn’t going away. It deserves honest engagement — not the kind that papers over the difficulty with cheerful reassurance, and not the kind that treats the difficulty as automatically disqualifying. Both responses are failures of nerve.
The Problem Taken Seriously
The first thing to say is that Scripture takes this problem seriously. The Psalms are not a collection of bright devotional thoughts. They are an archive of raw human experience before God — including the experience of God’s felt absence.
Psalm 13:1 opens without preamble: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” That’s not a rhetorical warmup. That’s a man in genuine darkness asking whether God has simply stopped showing up.
Psalm 88 is the darkest psalm in the Psalter — and unlike most lament psalms, it doesn’t resolve. It ends in darkness: “darkness is my closest friend.” No turn to praise. No “but I will trust.” Just darkness, and the address still directed at God. That psalm is in the canon. God put it there. That’s not an accident.
Job’s experience is the defining Old Testament case. A man who is explicitly described as blameless and upright (Job 1:1) loses everything and spends the bulk of the book crying out to a God who does not answer his questions. When God finally speaks from the whirlwind, He doesn’t explain the suffering. He asks Job where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid. That’s not a dodge — but it’s also not the explanation Job asked for.
And then there is Jesus, whose cry from the cross — “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46) — is the most devastating hiddenness text in all of Scripture. The Son of God experienced the felt absence of the Father. Whatever that means at the level of Trinitarian metaphysics, it is the ground on which all Christian reflection on hiddenness must stand.
Schellenberg’s Argument and Its Assumptions
Schellenberg’s argument is clean and emotionally powerful. But it rests on an assumption worth examining: that a perfectly loving God would make His presence continuously and clearly felt to anyone who wasn’t actively resisting Him.
That assumption imports a particular model of love — one in which love means maximizing the other person’s immediate experiential comfort and never allowing them to sit in painful uncertainty. But that’s not how love works even between human beings. A good parent doesn’t eliminate all discomfort from a child’s life. A good coach doesn’t make every practice feel easy. A good friend sometimes says hard things and allows hard seasons to do their work. The best relationships in human experience are often the ones that have been deepened precisely by having survived darkness together.
The question Schellenberg’s argument can’t fully answer is: why should we assume that God’s love is best expressed through continuous, comfortable, unmistakable presence? What if some purposes of God — purposes that genuinely serve the good of the people He loves — require seasons of hiddenness?
“Perhaps the reason God is sometimes hidden is not that He is absent, but that He is at work in ways that require us not to be able to see what He is doing. The darkness is not empty.” — Michael Rea, The Hiddenness of God
This isn’t a dismissal of the problem. It’s a challenge to one of its key premises. And once that premise is open to question, the argument doesn’t go through as cleanly as Schellenberg intends.
Five Reasons God May Hide
Scripture and the theological tradition offer several genuine reasons why a loving God might allow — or even ordain — seasons of hiddenness. These are not offered as tidy explanations to shut down the pain. They are offered as theological ground to stand on when the ground feels like it’s gone.
1. Hiddenness and the Formation of Faith. Faith that only functions in clear experiential awareness of God isn’t really faith — it’s sight. Hebrews 11:1 defines faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” The not-seeing is part of the definition. God may hide precisely so that the faith that persists through hiddenness is genuinely faith rather than a sophisticated response to felt experience. Abraham was called to leave for a place he did not know (Hebrews 11:8). The darkness was the arena in which faith was forged, not a malfunction in the system.
2. Hiddenness and the Purification of Motive. There’s an uncomfortable question embedded in the story of Job: do you love God for what He gives, or do you love God? The satan’s challenge to God in Job 1 is essentially a motive-testing argument — “Does Job fear God for no reason?” (Job 1:9). Hiddenness strips away the experiential rewards of faith and forces the question: what is actually driving this? A God who never withdrew His felt presence would never allow that question to be answered — and a faith that has never faced that question is an untested faith.
3. Hiddenness and the Avoidance of Compulsion. C.S. Lewis made this point memorably: if God made His presence overwhelmingly obvious at all times, the human response to Him would not be free. It would be compelled. A God who irresistibly manifested Himself in every moment would not be eliciting love — He would be producing a kind of cognitive capitulation. Some degree of hiddenness preserves the space in which genuine, free response to God remains possible. God wants to be chosen, not merely recognized.
4. Hiddenness and the Groaning of a Fallen World. Romans 8 gives the deepest theological framework for hiddenness: the whole creation is groaning (Romans 8:22). We ourselves groan inwardly, waiting for adoption and redemption (Romans 8:23). We don’t know how to pray as we ought (Romans 8:26). The felt hiddenness of God is part of the eschatological condition of a world not yet redeemed — a world in which we walk by faith and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7), not because sight is unimportant but because the fullness of sight is a future gift, not a present possession.
5. Hiddenness and the Depth of Union. This one is counterintuitive but important. The mystics of the Christian tradition — John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and in the modern era, the journals of Mother Teresa published after her death — describe what John called the “dark night of the soul” not as God’s absence but as a specific mode of God’s presence. In the dark night, the felt consolations of faith are stripped away so that the soul is drawn into a deeper, quieter, more naked reliance on God Himself rather than on the experiences God gives. The darkness, on this account, is not God pulling back. It is God drawing nearer in a way the emotions cannot track.
The Witness of the Mystics
Mother Teresa’s private letters, published in Come Be My Light (2007), revealed that for roughly fifty years — almost the entire span of her active ministry — she experienced virtually no felt sense of God’s presence. She described the interior darkness as total and sustained. And she continued. She served. She prayed. She built. She went on.
That fact sits uncomfortably alongside Schellenberg’s argument. Here was a woman who by any reasonable measure was not resisting God, not closed to Him, not harboring secret unbelief — and she lived in sustained darkness for half a century. Schellenberg’s argument says that shouldn’t be possible for a loving God to allow. Mother Teresa’s life says it happened.
Two conclusions are possible. Either God did not love her — which seems absurd on the face of it. Or the assumption that a loving God would not allow this kind of sustained darkness is wrong.
“If I ever become a saint — I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ I will continually be absent from heaven — to light the light of those in darkness on earth.” — Mother Teresa, private correspondence, Come Be My Light
What’s striking about her letters is not just the darkness but the way she interpreted it — as solidarity with those she served, as a participation in the abandonment Christ experienced on the cross, as a vocation within her vocation. She didn’t understand it fully. But she didn’t let it be the last word.
What the Cross Does to This Problem
No Christian account of divine hiddenness can bypass the cross, because the cross is the supreme instance of it. The Son of God cried out in desolation. Whatever the precise Trinitarian mechanics, the experiential reality of hiddenness was real for Jesus in His humanity at that moment. God was silent when His Son needed Him most — or so it appeared from inside the experience.
And then Easter. The silence broke. The hiddenness was not abandonment. The darkness was not the end. The God who seemed absent was present all along — present in a way that could not be seen from inside the crucifixion but that became unmistakably clear from the other side of it.
The resurrection doesn’t explain the cry of dereliction. It doesn’t retroactively make the darkness comfortable. But it does tell us something critical: the silence of heaven is not the same as the absence of God. The darkness is not the final word. What appears from inside the experience as abandonment can be, from outside it, the most decisive moment of divine activity in history.
That’s not a proof that your particular darkness has a purpose you’ll one day see. It’s not a promise that the silence will always break in this life. But it is evidence — the most dramatic evidence in the history of the world — that God’s hiddenness and God’s love are not contradictions. They coexisted on a hill outside Jerusalem. They can coexist in your life too.
Living in the Silence
What does faithful Christian living look like in a season of hiddenness? The biblical answer is more honest than most Christian culture allows.
Keep talking to the silence. The Psalms don’t stop addressing God when God feels absent. The address continues. The complaint is lodged with God, not about God to someone else. “My God, my God” — even in desolation, the relationship remains the frame. Lament directed at God is a form of faith, not its abandonment.
Don’t interpret the silence too quickly. The disciples on Holy Saturday interpreted the silence as the end. They were wrong. The temptation in seasons of hiddenness is to draw final conclusions from incomplete data. Hold conclusions loosely. “Now we see in a mirror dimly” (1 Corinthians 13:12) — the hiddenness is partly an epistemological condition, not only a relational one.
Let the community carry you. One of the functions of the church is precisely this — when your own sense of God has gone cold or dark, you are held by the faith of the body. The corporate worship, the preached word, the shared table — these are not substitutes for personal encounter with God. They are the means by which God sustains people whose personal encounter has temporarily dimmed. You’re not meant to generate faith alone in the dark.
Don’t confuse the felt absence with the fact of absence. Feelings are real. But they are not always accurate reporters of reality. Deuteronomy 31:6 — “he will not leave you or forsake you” — is a statement of fact, not a description of how you’ll always feel. The promise does not depend on the feeling. The feeling does not negate the promise.
If You’re In the Silence Right Now
Don’t perform certainty you don’t have. Don’t pretend the darkness is light. But don’t make the mistake of concluding that the silence means what it feels like it means. The psalmists kept praying into the dark. Job kept addressing God even when God wasn’t answering. Jesus cried out in desolation — and three days later, the silence broke open. Keep the address. Keep showing up. The darkness has not had the last word in any story where God is the author. It has not had the last word in yours.
Key Takeaways
- Divine hiddenness is a biblical reality, not just a philosophical problem. Psalm 13, Psalm 88, Job, and the cry of dereliction all take the felt absence of God with full seriousness — and place it inside the canon as part of the honest life of faith.
- Schellenberg’s argument rests on a contestable premise. The assumption that a loving God would ensure continuous felt presence for any genuinely open seeker imports a model of love that doesn’t hold even in the best human relationships.
- There are genuine theological reasons for hiddenness. The formation of faith, the purification of motive, the preservation of free response, the eschatological condition of a fallen world, and the mystics’ dark night all point toward hiddenness as purposive rather than arbitrary.
- Mother Teresa’s fifty years of darkness is evidence against Schellenberg. A genuinely open, non-resistant believer sustained sustained darkness for decades — which suggests the argument’s premise fails in the real world.
- The cross is the supreme instance of hiddenness — and the resurrection is the supreme answer. The Son cried out in desolation. God was present and active in what appeared as abandonment. That pattern does not explain every darkness, but it does establish that hiddenness and love can coexist.
- Lament is faith, not its failure. The psalms of complaint address God into the silence. That address is itself a form of trust — the refusal to stop treating God as the one who owes an answer even when He isn’t giving one.
- The felt absence is not the fact of absence. The promise of God’s presence (Deuteronomy 31:6; Hebrews 13:5) is not contingent on the feeling of God’s presence. Holding that distinction is not denial — it’s faith operating in the conditions for which it was designed.
Key Scriptures: Psalm 13:1 · Psalm 88:18 · Job 1:9 · Job 23:8–10 · Isaiah 45:15 · Matthew 27:46 · Romans 8:22–26 · 2 Corinthians 5:7 · Hebrews 11:1 · Deuteronomy 31:6 · 1 Corinthians 13:12
